William Faulkner (1897–1962)

William Faulkner was born in Mississippi. He lived most of his life there. He wrote about the American South the way a geologist writes about rock: as a record of enormous pressure applied over a very long time.

His sentences do not end. They fold back on themselves, accumulate, spiral. A single Faulkner sentence can contain a life, a family, a century of shame. He was not laconic. He was the opposite: he believed that only by circling a thing from every angle could you begin to see its true shape.

His characters carry their history in their blood and their grammar. The way Benjy Compson speaks in The Sound and the Fury is not a style choice. It is what trauma does to time.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1949. In his acceptance speech, he said a writer must never be afraid to write about courage, honour, hope, pride, compassion, pity, sacrifice. He said these are the old universal truths. He spent his life proving they were not simple.

He gave no Nobel Lecture, but his banquet speech (1950) is one of the most famous ever given there. It contains the sentence: "I decline to accept the end of man." Read it, or hear him, at NobelPrize.org.